Opening speech by director Ekaterina Degot

18.9.25
Schauspielhaus Graz

In what times do we live?

As Karl Kraus famously wrote, “In these great times, which I knew when they were this small; [and] which will become small again, provided they have time left for it.”

Maybe retrospectively we will look at these times of ours with tenderness, or perhaps with remorse, knowing already that these were prewar times.

But this moment has not yet come, not for us, not here in felix Austria. So, technically, we are all still in dusty postwar times, those after the last big war in Europe. Nobody has yet canceled this state of things. So we party like it’s 1946 or—as we are in Austria—1955.

We believe, or pretend to believe, that international institutions like the UN, created to represent the global progressive consensus that condemns aggressions, are still forceful. We believe, or pretend to believe, that America still guarantees the Pax Americana through its domination. And we believe, deeply want to believe, that antifascism is a common platform and “never again” the universal password of progressives.

On the cultural front, we are also still in post–World War II times. The victory over fascism was also modern art’s moral victory. Modern values and modernist art—the one once aesthetically censored as “degenerate”—were not just legalized but identified, often idealistically, with humanism.

In Graz, this new modernity happened late, around the mid-1960s. steirischer herbst was part of these times when darkness persisted and the slogan was not so much “never again” but rather “enough of this.” There was this liberal milieu in Graz that created and supported the festival, these political conservatives who were also antifascists, sometimes against their will, often out of atonement, but that made it even stronger. They were able to make political alliances not to be ashamed of. They knew they had to open the windows and let the world in.

Every now and then I am asking myself, does this Graz liberal antifascist society, almost a family, one that was built on a common moral compass and perhaps some dark secrets, still exist?

Do we, today, talk enough about the fact that the intellectual culture created back then is the legacy Graz has to be proud of? Not the green loden of enlightened monarchy, not the antisemitic Heimat poetry.

Or was, like former Kleine Zeitung editor Frido Hütter once wrote, steirischer herbst created to redirect the politically explosive force of the cultural revolution of 1968 into the safer territory of art? Perhaps the festival created, as Hütter put it, an “applied avant-garde” that politicians tried to keep on a leash?

They still sometimes try, you know, and not just with us. “Art and politics,” this classical student’s essay topic, has a particular iteration in Graz: art and politicians.

But I am also asking myself what happened to the bigger legacy of post–World War II antifascism, and if it is not crumbling like the whole post-Nuremberg world order.

Now, antifascists are famous for being good comrades, and this is the role of Ernst Toller in our project this year. Many years after his tragic death in the late 1930s, the death of someone who already knew “Nie wieder” would not work, he came to a rescue for our very provocative title.

Because “Never Again Peace” came to me before I even googled it and discovered we have a wonderful alibi in the form of Toller’s flamboyant satirical comedy Nie wieder Friede, around which we do so many things this year. Our “Never Again Peace” is very much dictated by current events. There is no peace, true. But there is no “never again” anymore either.

We are now witnessing a shameless perversion of words and meanings, a massive and very violent rewriting of what I saw as an ultimate consensus. Putin’s war in Ukraine is relying on the undeniable fact of the Soviets’ victory over fascists in Berlin and is meant to fight mythical “Ukrainian fascists” of today. Peace is officially the goal of this war. Netanyahu and his government use the reference to the undeniable fact of the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany to justify their own genocidal crimes committed toward the whole population of Gaza. The retaliation for the crimes of Hamas more and more looks like an attempt to displace—or starve—the whole population of Gaza to keep the region araberfrei.

The whole history of heroic victory over fascism, as well as the tragic destiny of European Jews together with other vulnerable groups, is tainted. The infallible argument is broken. This historical example, this rhetorical device, seems to be useless from now on. We lost it. We will have to live without it from now on. In a way, we are at a Stunde Null. The rhetorical war is lost.

We started our journey today with LIGNA on Freedom Square. It is true: freedom is only the beginning, not an end in itself, even if it is one of those easy words that slip into slogan mode too quickly. It shares this unfortunate destiny of quickly losing its value with the word “peace.” Peace might mean war, as we see. Freedom can very easily mean unfreedom, for which there is not even a word, as if freedom were so borderless that it would fill the whole space of human life, and unfreedom would mean death.

That is the case for some, but not for all. Many people in Russia gave away their freedom to a dictator freely—to feel free from freedom. Not just from the necessity to take decisions, which might remind us of Nazi Germany, but from societal regulations associated with today’s West, where waste is separated, red traffic lights are observed, downloading films for free is illegal, and sexist jokes are only told in whispers. This West seems too orderly, too moralistic, too political perhaps; Russia becomes, paradoxically, a place free from politics, an ideal place to create art that would be “real art” and not a “woke statement.”

That goes for Russia, but many in Israel also feel free, definitely freer than Palestinians, and not because of the political regime, which some prefer to ignore, but because they think they are part of the “free world” and better people because of that, that their lives are more valuable.

Liberté, which was in such a close bond with egalité and fraternité, can now work as an instrument of class and racial hierarchy.

But what about art: Is it the place for freedom? In the German-speaking world, they seem to be strongly connected: the freedom of art is mentioned in the Austrian constitution (as well as in the German one). It is also in my work contract.

But what does it mean when artists are given some special freedom of expression, which is supposedly placed higher than freedom of speech and exceeds—even if only slightly—the freedoms and rights of the rest of the population, who cannot prove they are artists?

You only need to produce, or exhibit, a truly political statement—and a difficult statement at that—in the form of an artwork. My strong hunch is that in some contexts, one could then hear, “This is not art,” “This is propaganda,” therefore it does not enjoy the privilege of being free. It seems art is only considered free if it is free from politics, and freedom of speech does not seem to be granted to art … because it is art and should be about beauty.

Well, beauty it used to be; today everybody knows these times are passé. But art is still supposed to represent indisputable qualities—now it is rather community spirit, the ability to bring people together, in a place where they would forget about their political disagreements.

The only answer to this is that freedom of speech does not just precede the freedom of art but encompasses it. Art has no specific freedom that would be bigger than the freedom of the rest of society. When it grants itself drastic, violent freedoms, as was the case with Viennese Actionism or Pussy Riot, it is a symptom of an unnamed unfreedom around it, a loud cry about it. At steirischer herbst, we talk a lot, we converse, we sometimes sing, at times we whisper. But we will be able to yell if the moment comes.

The speech held at Schauspielhaus Graz represents a shortened version (with extemporaneous passages) of the text reproduced here.